The casket was the heaviest thing I’ve ever carried, though it couldn’t have been more than thirty pounds and there were four of us doing the carrying. It looked like a Styrofoam cooler. I thought maybe if I opened it up I could grab an iced tall boy and drink away the cold drizzle and dripping faces of the funeral party.
There were four of us pallbearers. Danny, Oscar, and Victor–the godfather, uncle, and father to the thing in the casket, respectively. I don’t know what I was, except that there had to be four and that there were four long-handled shovels waiting for us beside the tiny wound in the earth toward which we shuffled.
I kept telling myself ‘Don’t fucking drop it.’ and it seemed to get heavier.
Before this there had been the church, and the priest with the slow and stupid Spanish who connected “Christopher” to “Christ.” The casket was open, like some fucked crib the child would never escape. I looked inside when my turn came. Inside was a stiff body wrapped up like a parcel, petrified larvae, really, six months developed and then hardened irreversibly by air itself, a vacated shell.
We drank tequila and got into Dodge Durangos to chain-smoke and not-talk our way to the cemetery.
I kept telling myself ‘Don’t fucking drop it.’ We shuffled toward the grave. This section of the cemetery was devoted to children. It must have been the most lucrative plot of all, since the graves took up so little space and some of the markers, like Christopher’s, only needed the one etched year to cover both B. and D.
The sites were all marked with images of cherubim; you could hear the tiny winged things bumping against the tops of their boxes trying to get airborne. I wanted to ask if the other pallbearers could hear them, but didn’t want to distract them from the heavy thing we were all of us carrying.
Morning Poop 
So good…….